"Project A" HKL interview

There's a special bond that we have and the three of us together can talk and discuss things freely. It's a very... there's no need to communicate specifically. We don't have to worry about it. If three actors who aren't familiar with one another make a film, they won't be so relaxed. But with the three of us, we all know what each other is doing. When one of us speaks, we know what he means. Ever since we were young, we had the same teacher, we'd talk and we knew each other well, so it's easy. When the three of us are together, we have a kind of telepathic bond which we developed in our childhood. I can't explain it to you. It's like you look at me and I know what will happen next. It is a special... attitude. It's like when your parents see a look on your face and know what you are up to. Say ou want to speak and you move like this first. There are a lot of little nuances like this with us. Like when we say "Remember that from when we were young?" Only we would know. Nobody else will. A director doesn't have to speak to us individually. The three of us... Well, it's a lot quicker.

I was born in Hong Kong. I didn't like going to school as a child. I never went to school and my parents... I was always going out to play and watching opera. My parents always went to... like most Shanghai people of that era, they loved going to the opera. As I didn't like studying or going to school, I accompanied my parents to the opera. There I saw Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Wah and others... We went to the same opera school, but they started well before me. I went watch them every night. It was exciting... all the tumbling, and the kung fu. As my father liked it he enrolled me into school - into a Peking Opea School. That was when I first joined a school. My real surname is Har and my real name is Har Ling-jun. When we entered the school we all had to change our names with the word Yuen in them, because our master was called Yu Jim Yuen and his pupils were called "Yuen this" and "Yuen that". Jackie was called Yuen Lau, Sammo was called Yuen Lung, Yuen Wah and so on, you know. My relationship with our teacher... As a child, meeting my teacher was like meeting a tiger. If he was in front, we'd be behind him. If he was sitting, we sat next to him. We showed him respect, ever since we were little because he was so fearsome. He'd beat you if you were even the slightest... You just couldn't tolerate his punishment. But that was what he went through. Our teacher said it was like this when you learnt Peking Opera. As a child he also learnt under a strict regime. As a child my teacher was like a tiger. I saw my teacher and thought "You wait and see. When I grow up...". It was like that, I didn't know any better as a child. But by the time we came out to work in this industry, we realised that our teacher had taught us very useful things, since we didn't go to normal schools. After we graduated, we never thought "what next", as we were too young. My parents sent me out to learn opera... A child not intelligent enough to think about his future. Who at that age knows what he is going to do in the future? It was only when people often asked me this, that I would think. A child would not think this far. I was never "I'm learning to be an operatic actor so I will be one". As an apprentice you learnt a trade and later you had the option to use it if you wanted to. It's like studying a particular subject to do a specific job. We studied opera so we'd enter the entertainment industry. And if we followed through with it, this would be our career. Otherwise we'd have nothing. In Hong Kong there wasn't anything. If there wasn't a film industry we'd be lost. We were lucky that then in Hong Kong people liked this kind of film, and there were people who could perform it to represent Hong Kong. This became the mainstream film. Then eventually, Hong Kong became renowned for its action movies. Romance could never achieve that, because there is a language barrier in foreign markets. They do not understand Cantonese, nor do I understand English. But with movements, you could understand easily. So, this was to our advantage.

Peking Opera is... It hasn't got thrust, power or speed. It has endurance. Like holding your leg up and leaving it here. The audience likes this. We learnt this as children - endurance and stability. But you can't use Peking Opera on film so I learnt other kung fu katas. On top of our basic knowledge, we also learnt some practical martial arts, like Taekwondo, karate, boxing, etc. So we learnt this and incorporated it and added some difficulty to see if it was possible to add it to a film. If you were filming, I was always thinking of ways of kicking, ways to make kicking look good, always thinking of different ways. I was interested in creating ways of doing this. I made them up myself. Nobody taught me that. I created these action sequences for others to do. If they couldn't do it, I went and did it myself. The audience likes watching me fight, not laugh or cry. Leung Kar Yan has a different style, the audience can see this. I don't think the audience would compare the two actors on screen and we wouldn't do that as actors. We would do our best and to the way the director wanted it. Whatever the audience likes to watch, we'll try and do it, so the audience would react "Wow!". We'd try and think of more ways to do this. We'd known about Bruce Lee ever since we were children. Regarding what he could do, he did deserve people's admiration. On film his kung fu was magnificent, but regarding filming techniques those old films were not that sophisticated, they were one-man shows. If he wasn't so great, there would be nothing to see. We went to the same school... When we had left school we had all done Bruce Lee's films like Bruce Lee's last film Enter the Dragon. He died before finishing The Game of Death. We did Enter the Dragon together with Lam Ching-ying... Bruce Lee liked our group. He liked us, the stuntmen, very much. So in Enter the Dragon, from the Big Boss... We had collaborated on a lot of Bruce Lee films as martial artists. After Bruce Lee died, action films declined for a short time. Then Sammo Hung and us emerged. We made action movies together, with Sammo Hung as leader.

Did you do Fist of Fury?
Yes we made it. But we were very young, about 16 or 17. They used a lot of martial artists. There was a lot of talent. Hong Kong had a lot of stuntmen. How would I describe it? There were groups of us, we were the Peking Opera group - those who'd learnt from childhood. So, we went into the Peking Opera groups. There were those who did Cantonese films, like those fashionable... For example, those by Yu Soo-chow and Lau Kar-leung. They were all different. Those in the Peking Opera groups were all about the same age and had all started out together. So us and Lam Ching-ying and one other, Chan Wui-ngai, were all doing it together. We started our career as marital artist, then proceeded to be action directors then action actors, until Lam Ching-ying passed away and we... So we don't have an ordinary relationship. If we met now, we wouldn't have a lot to talk about. We worked with each other every day for over 10 years. Though we have nothing to say, our relationship is special.
Oh that, how do I put it... Amongst all the brothers I am the introvert. Jackie and Sammo, they love going out and enjoying themselves. They like socialising, I don't. I prefer going home after work. I can stay at home all day doing my own thing. I don't like to hang around much. I'd rather do the things I like doing.
My relationship with Sammo Hung was like any other of the school relationships except it was special in a way... When everyone graduated, we all went our separate ways but Sammo and I stuck together and worked together, we were together since that time. The others went and did their own films, but the two of us always worked together on films, throughout all our time in the industry, well, at Golden Harvest anyway. After Golden Harvest we parted and didn't make films together anymore. But my relationship with Sammo was different. Apart from being at school, where we grew up together, we worked together as well. So it was different.